In its salad days, Olneyville was home to a thriving textile industry in Providence, Rhode Island. But the looms went quiet long ago, and for much of the 20th century the neighborhood was one of the most distressed places in the state. In 1978, the Providence Planning Department found that over half of Olneyville’s houses needed “immediate attention,” were in a state of “advanced deterioration,” or were “heavily deteriorated and dilapidated.”

Today, people reach for different words when they describe Olneyville: Hip. Trendy. Chic. Neighborhood nonprofits converted a sprawling, toxic dump into a prize-winning park. A community development corporation replaced scores of vacant lots and abandoned buildings with below-market rate housing. School officials remade its local elementary school into a treasured neighborhood anchor.

But the victories that low-income residents and their allies worked so hard to achieve brought the neighborhood to the attention of an entirely new demographic. Olneyville in the 21st century has also become whiter, significantly more unequal, and substantially more expensive. Gentrification now threatens the Latinx community that has called Olneyville home since the 1990s.

The lesson—a lesson repeated across the country—is that America’s current approach to neighborhood well-being can transform a place like Olneyville but cannot protect it. This poses morally urgent questions: Do the ploughshares we use to improve a neighborhood become the swords that destroy it? In the wealthiest country on earth, can it really be that the poor only get to live in wretched places? Is it simply impossible to create a low-income neighborhood that is also safe, healthy, vibrant, and sustainable?

I spent four years studying Olneyville’s transformation—research that started quite by accident. I went to Providence in 2017 to learn about its police department, which was said to have transformed from a corrupt, brutal, paramilitary organization in the 20th century to a national model of community policing in the 21st.

The neighborhood where the new department had made the biggest impact was Olneyville, where crime rates plummeted and residents forged a new link to the police. In talking to residents and activists about the shift, however, I realized that policing was only part of the story. Olneyville also needed affordable housing, ample green space, healthy food, and good schools. Yet, paradoxically, as Olneyville residents and their allies tackled these vexing problems, their home became both more livable and more vulnerable.

Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people in the neighborhood who had attended college nearly doubled, and the number with a college or advanced degree nearly tripled. In the first decade and a half of the 21st century, average rents in the neighborhood climbed over 54 percent, more than twice the citywide average. “That’s not transformation for the neighborhood,” one longtime Latina advocate told me of the new restaurants and coffee shops popping up around her. “It’s not gonna be the same neighborhood.”

There are no villains in this story. At least, none with blood and bones. The people and organizations that serve Olneyville residents don’t want to be agents of destruction. But they are part of a system beset by two fundamental problems.

First, policymakers hew to the neoliberal notion that social problems are better solved by the private sector than by government (which cannot solve social problems because it is too inefficient, bloated, and sclerotic, the thinking goes). So the principal role of government in a distressed neighborhood like Olneyville is to create opportunities for private investors. Take housing, for instance. The federal government has not added to the nation’s store of public housing for decades. Instead, it uses tax breaks and subsidies to create financial incentives for landlords and developers to provide shelter for some (but nowhere near all) of the people who cannot afford housing at market rates. Responsibility for housing these people has shifted from government itself to private actors who are paid by the government to create housing at below market rates.

Most of the new homes and apartments built in Olneyville were financed through such programs. But this public funding is not remotely enough to house all who need shelter, or to stabilize rents at affordable levels. Even below-market rents are still beyond the reach of most Olneyville residents. Wealthier newcomers move in to take advantage of rents that are cheaper than downtown. Housing that is intended to be affordable instead becomes an engine of gentrification.

The second fundamental problem is equally serious but more pernicious. The current approach to neighborhood well-being empowers a small army of nonprofits and community development corporations that provide vital services to neighborhood residents but that tend to be      managed, staffed, and funded by well-intended and comparatively well-heeled whites who typically do not live in or come from the neighborhoods they serve.

As a result, outsiders, rather than low-income residents, decide how to spend the money that flows into the neighborhood. Outsiders establish connections with politicians and funders throughout the region, and reap the social and political capital that comes from these connections. Outsiders become leaders; residents become supplicants.

In short, the tools available in a neoliberal age will never prevent capital from overrunning a place like Olneyville, and will never equip its victims to fight back.

The solution is to fund and empower the poor rather than the wealthy. Give low-income residents ownership and control of neighborhood assets, including the money that flows in from outside. Place the assets in trust for the permanent benefit of low-income residents, and deploy them to remove property from the speculative market, creating sustainable affordability. Pair investment with state or federal tax credits to augment those assets, but only on the explicit condition that money that flows into the neighborhood be controlled entirely by low-income residents and their chosen allies.

I call this solution a Neighborhood Trust—and several organizations have begun to implement and improve upon my idea. The Kensington Corridor Trust, the first of its type in the country, is acquiring real estate assets along a commercial corridor in a badly distressed neighborhood in Philadelphia and removing them from the market for the benefit of the residents and small business owners in the neighborhood.

The organization plans to create a vibrant, sustainable mix of affordable residential and commercial rental units along Kensington Avenue, the commercial heart of the neighborhood—with culturally desirable businesses that provide affordable goods and services and create secure, high-paying jobs at the street-level and affordable apartments on the floors above. Keeping these assets in the trust ensures permanent affordability and guarantees that the neighborhood captures any increases in the land’s value.

Another model is taking shape in the Midwest. Trust Neighborhoods, based in Kansas City, helps distressed neighborhoods set up and run trusts themselves, finding outside capital for funding, getting existing neighborhood organizations involved in operations—and, again, removing assets from the private market to hold within the trust for the permanent benefit of low-income neighborhood residents. They call their model a MINT, for mixed-income neighborhood trust. Market-rate tenants live in units owned by the trust, and the rent they pay subsidizes low-income tenants renting at below-market rates nearby—perhaps upstairs in a duplex, or next door. The hope is that a mix of low-income and market-rate tenants, all renting from the trust, will protect the entire neighborhood.

Neighborhoods in Tulsa and Kansas City have already created MINTs. Trust Neighborhoods expects another five neighborhoods will do so by the end of 2021, and is in discussions with representatives from more than 100 other low-income neighborhoods across the country.

By itself, a neighborhood trust will not solve all the problems that confront a place like Olneyville. It will not stop climate change, revive the manufacturing sector, or make people tolerant. It will not end racism, classism, or xenophobia. But it will give poor residents ownership and control of the wealth that flows into their neighborhoods. It will let them permanently capture increases in the value of land, invest and manage their capital, and deploy assets as they see fit. It will restore some of the wealth and social capital that have been drained away by decades of disinvestment and neglect. And that, in turn, will give the poor something they have never had in this country: power.

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The event, titled “Can Boyle Heights Save America?” streamed online. But it was deeply grounded in the small details and larger meanings of a neighborhood—sitting above the Los Angeles River, across from downtown and between the 10 and 5 freeways—that has long been a place for Southern California’s new arrivals.

USC historian and professor of American studies and ethnicity George J. Sánchez—whose new book, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, inspired the program—argued that Americans should look to Boyle Heights as they question the true nature of belonging and citizenship.

“This is a country that is having a crisis of democracy,” said Sánchez, a native of Boyle Heights whose parents chose to settle there after emigrating from Mexico. “And people don’t know how neighborhoods can make a difference. I think there’s a lot to learn from Boyle Heights and Boyle Heights history in terms of how do you make democracy actually happen with working-class people, with poorer people.”

Sánchez suggested that despite influxes of people and major disruptions, Boyle Heights has survived and remained a distinctive and cohesive place because its people held onto their different cultures, rather than losing them in a melting pot. “They didn’t melt—they each took incredible pride in their own backgrounds,” he said. “They were fortified in their cultures and in what they brought to each other.”

That statement from Sánchez came near the end of a wide-ranging, hour-plus discussion of Boyle Heights that touched on its food (especially the combo burrito at Al & Bea’s), its art, its beautiful places (from Hollenbeck Park to the Tenrikyo Church), its Victorian houses, the marvels of Roosevelt High School and its vast alumni network, and why the place has so many cemeteries (because L.A.’s 19th-century planners thought that the city would never expand any further east).

Josefina López, author of Real Women Have Curves and founding artistic director of CASA 0101 Theater in Boyle Heights, joined Sánchez on the panel, which was moderated by Los Angeles Times city editor Hector Becerra, a Boyle Heights native.

After an introduction of the event from another Boyle Heights native—former L.A. County supervisor and UCLA Luskin Los Angeles Initiative director Zev Yaroslavsky—Becerra asked López and Sánchez, “Who are you because of Boyle Heights?”

López replied with two words: “resiliency and survival.” Born in Mexico, she immigrated to the neighborhood as a child and credited the multiethnic influences of its Japanese, Jewish, and Italian histories. “I think I am Boyle Heights,” she said. “Because I am an immigrant [and] because I borrowed from so many different flavors and experiences.” The neighborhood, she added, “taught me to be creative.”

López has spent time elsewhere but keeps returning to Boyle Heights because it is home—and because she wants to be part of protecting such a distinctive place.

Noting the city government’s neglect of the community in many ways, she said she has long feared gentrification and other damaging changes. “You see how all these [other] Latino neighborhoods are being gentrified,” she said. “I wanted to empower people so we could own our own narrative.”

Boyle Heights welcomes immigrants and new arrivals, but they need to respect the neighborhood. Some art galleries that moved in quickly moved out because they didn’t get along with the community. “You’re not Columbus discovering the natives,” she said. “We have cultures. It is not a blank canvas. You’re welcome, you can contribute, but you can’t just whitewash it.”

Boyle Heights, always a very creative place, has become well-known as a center for the arts, ratified in part by the arrival of Self Help Graphics from East L.A. But doing anything new in the community is not easy. López talked in detail about starting CASA 0101 Theater in 2000—which supports the development of local actors and playwrights, with an emphasis on Latino stories—and recounted the difficulties of opening her restaurant, Casa Fina. She said that challenges include permitting issues, perceptions of Boyle Heights as dangerous, and over-policing.

For his part, Sánchez noted that one big reason why Boyle Heights has been resilient is that its people—through unions and organizations like Mothers of East L.A. and Homeboy Industries—have so often had to organize to protect the community. Its proximity to the city center has made it a frequent target for the redevelopment plans of downtown interests. Boyle Heights’ talent for organizing also benefited from the histories of activism among the people who settled there, including Jewish radicals who came in the early 20th century and African Americans who moved in because they could buy houses there. The famous student walkouts in 1968, he noted, were the product of longtime interactions and mutual learning between Chicano activists and African Americans in Boyle Heights.

Today, Sánchez said, the neighborhood is still a place of remarkable interactions between different peoples, often on streets where residents walk more than they do elsewhere in L.A. But he also pointed to threats to the community. Many business owners, he said, are worried that too many property owners don’t live in Boyle Heights and don’t care enough about the neighborhood.

He also said that more Latinos, having left Boyle Heights for college and professional careers, are coming back home. “This is a big difference with other communities,” he said. These returning residents have given Boyle Heights more middle-class people and produced an uptick in home ownership. That puts pressure on the rental market and begs the question: “Is Boyle Heights going to remain a place that low-income recent immigrants can move into?”

Sánchez urged people to watch closely what happens around old industrial properties like the Sears building and at the neighborhood’s southern border, around the 5. These places are ripe for transformation and gentrification, he added, and the city and the neighborhood need to talk about how to protect its “multi-class environment.”

He said such an environment, if preserved, could augur a very different Los Angeles “where Boyle Heights is going to give an opportunity to the Mexican American who may not be bilingual to feel comfortable with recent immigrants.” There’s value in that for everyone.

“Assimilation doesn’t just work in one direction,” he said. “It needs a canvas that can work in both directions. I think Boyle Heights will start playing that role more often.”

The YouTube broadcast of the event was accompanied by a lively chat room, in which current and former Boyle Heights residents, along with prominent journalists, discussed all sorts of neighborhood issues. The panelists addressed questions posed in that chat on everything from political representation of Boyle Heights to the ludicrousness of Silver Lake residents saying they live on “the Eastside.”

“That’s as far east as you’ll go? Really?” López said sarcastically, before suggesting that her theater might need a campaign, or a new show, or at least bumper stickers that make plain where “the real Eastside” is.

López also discussed her and Sánchez’s plans to create the Boyle Heights Museum, which will offer both a history of the neighborhood and a center for democratic action and social justice work.

In response to one audience member’s question, Sánchez noted that the neighborhood is a particularly strong example of “non-electoral democracy.” Its population is heavily undocumented and very young, “so it contains a lot of people who cannot vote.” As a result, Boyle Heights demonstrates the power of other forms of democracy. “It’s about protest. It’s about showing up. It’s about saying, we are citizens of this neighborhood,” he said.

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If you follow the music charts, it might seem preposterous to think of Eilish as the California girl next door. After all, the 18-year-old is the first international pop star born in the 21st century, with the best-selling album of the past year, 50 million social media followers, and six nominations at this month’s Grammys, including nods for song, record, and album of the year. And her other-worldly voice, which can sound by turns angelic or menacing, is already among the most distinctive sounds in popular culture.

But, for all the exalted heights she’s reached, Eilish relentlessly portrays herself as a regular kid who is fundamentally grounded in her unglamorous neighborhood, Highland Park, in the northeast corner of the city of Los Angeles. In fashion magazines and TV appearances, Eilish is often photographed in and around the modest home—a 1,200-square foot, two-bedroom bungalow—where she still lives with her parents.

The house, in Eilish’s telling, is not just a symbol of her humility. It’s also the site of her creative inspiration. There, in one bedroom, Eilish and her older brother and collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, wrote, recorded and uploaded her first hit, “Ocean Eyes,” which got streamed more than 1 billion times. It’s also where they made Eilish’s 2019 album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, which brought her as many Grammy nominations as Lil Nas X.

I must confess to feeling especially connected to this neighborly narrative, because I live along the same busy corridor as Eilish, five minutes away and just across the 110 Freeway. In this section of Southern California, you might expect to find teachers, young downtown professionals, or even a columnist who took on too big a mortgage. But this area is not a natural headquarters for global superstars, especially in an era when the most successful wall themselves off from the hoi polloi.

With her meteoric rise having turned her home into the newest local attraction, I drove over to check the place out. To my surprise, the house has the same simple design as my own humble abode—and is actually a little smaller.

While the star who says she is one of us is an old trope, there is something intriguingly irregular about Eilish’s regularity. And her choice of the mashed-up neighborhood of Highland Park to represent her reflects a shift in the center of California’s cultural gravity away from the suburbs.

A half-century ago, another Southern California teenager with a magical voice erupted on the music scene. Karen Carpenter, like Eilish, collaborated with her big brother, and she too was portrayed as an average kid from a regular place—Downey, an L.A. suburb of the space age, with defense plants amidst middle-class houses and drive-in burger joints. In those days, Downey, like Carpenter’s music, represented a sunny California stability.

Eilish’s Highland Park, by contrast, is a messy mash-up of a neighborhood, far more urban than suburban. Its homes and apartment buildings, stuffed onto small lots, include every California architectural style. And its corridors feature an artsy-gritty mix of fancy coffee shops, downscale restaurants, and tattoo parlors, sometimes all on the same block.

Eilish—who favors baggy clothes, piercings, and a shock of neon-green hair—fits right in.

Highland Park, unlike Downey, is neither predictable nor stable. It has experienced considerable gentrification, and rising housing prices. (Eilish’s own home, purchased by her parents for $240,000 in 2001, is now worth more than $700,000, if you believe Zillow.) Highland Park is predominantly middle-income and Latino, with poorer people crammed into small rentals, and a significant homeless population wandering the streets.

Not long ago, Highland Park was the site of serious gang violence; homes and businesses still have bars over their windows. The closest restaurants to the now-famous Eilish home are a McDonald’s and a cheap taco place, and the closest row of businesses includes two auto body shops.

When I visited the neighborhood, trash had built up in alleys. A half-dozen homeless people had made a small encampment 300 yards from Eilish’s home; one of them kept dancing unsteadily out into traffic, as the others tried to talk him back.

In all of this, Highland Park encompasses the cross-pressures of a 21st-century California neighborhood. It’s a place of confounding change, as things seem to get better and worse at the same time.

It’s not hard to see how Highland Park influenced Eilish the artist. Her music, like her neighborhood, is a mash-up.

Each song on her album seems to nod to a different genre—rap, grunge, rock, emo. What her songs have in common is her magical voice—and a sensibility that mixes darkness and light.

In Eilish songs, the outside world is described like a horror film. She is wary of airplanes, fame, love (“Don’t you know I’m no good for you?” she sings in “When the Party’s Over”), beauty and emotion (“If teardrops could be bottled there’d be swimming pools filled by models.”) She is not vain; in her videos, her nose and eyes bleed, and she spits out her Invisalign.

When she writes of her home state, California is a place of fires and murders. She sings in one chorus:

Hills burn in California
My turn to ignore ya
Don’t say I didn’t warn ya
All the good girls go to hell

In “Bad Guy,” which is up for song and record of the year, she sings, “I do what I want when I’m wanting to. My soul? So cynical.”

Her father told Rolling Stone that Eilish “has no tolerance for people she’s not interested in and doesn’t give a shit whether you like her or not.”

But most of Eilish’s songs are about her interior life—and her need to defend the emotions within in. On this subject, she is warm and confessional (about struggles with anxiety) in a way that draws you in. She can be harsh, but she doesn’t curse. If Karen Carpenter represented a California ethos of smooth and sun-splashed optimism (a façade that Carpenter tragically couldn’t maintain), Eilish stands for a warier California where you must fight to keep a home, and your soul.

The Eilish defense is built around attitude. She is unaffected by the swirl around her, or at least she tries to be. That’s the outlook you might cultivate if you live in a messy neighborhood where anything or anyone might come at you at any time.

Weird, after all, is our new normal.

The post What Billie Eilish’s Highland Park Neighborhood Tells Us About 21st-Century California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the holidays approaching I thought that I couldn’t be any happier. Over the past four years everything has been going great. My family and friends are happy and healthy. I made supervisor at my job. I bought a car. I’m more involved in my community. Most importantly I grew to become a better person. With everything going well, I anticipated things would be great this holiday season for the fourth time in a row, but an unexpected turn crushed my hopes.

Over the past couple of years, my community has changed a lot. Most people would say things changed for the better, being that much-needed resources were added to the community over the past four years. For example, a new Work Source Center and The College Track, a resource center for aspiring college students in the community, were opened recently. Alta Med and Children’s Institute contributed new locations in Watts. Also, Martin Luther King., Jr Community Hospital was modernized, and a newly designed community garden even brought a smile to my face. Beyond this, the introduction of the “community based improvement initiative” Watts Re-imagined, the goal of which was to add opportunities and resources that benefitted the community, gave me even more to be thankful for just in time for Thanksgiving.

In addition to the changes, the apartment complex that I lived in was renovated. Some of the renovations included new paint jobs, hardwood floors, a new dishwasher, and new windows, which was great because they provided a cozy new look for residents. Just as everyone was elated over all the new resources, some of my neighbors were unfortunately given letters asking if they would consider moving in exchange for a small amount of money, or face eviction.

I didn’t agree with the idea of paying tenants to leave homes that they’d lived in for years. Rightfully angry, my neighbors rallied, arguing that this is an injustice, and that this is exactly what is wrong when gentrification infiltrates communities. Some of them even pointed out that they felt it was unfair that they weren’t going to be able to enjoy all these new resources, which they once had been thankful for. If the new upgrades meant that they would be left homeless, or forced to break social ties, they would rather do without.

I was equally upset and fearful that the some of the inevitable negative effects of gentrification would further encourage involuntary displacement. To me it felt like watching a child open up a desired Christmas gift, then having it snatched from them after it was unwrapped. I know from personal experience how hard financially the holidays can be on some families—and the additional stress and financial burden of moving from a beloved community to a new home had to be worse.

Although the holidays have been going well for me for the past couple of years, I couldn’t feel well inside knowing that although my community was progressing as a whole, some members were being left behind. It was a bittersweet feeling: to be thankful for all the resources given to my community, but knowing that some people were being asked to leave, unable to enjoy the holidays in the community they’ve lived in for years. I’m not sure how I could enjoy my holiday knowing that all wasn’t well—but it’s definitely on my Christmas list to help in any way that I can.

The post I’m Counting My Family’s Thanksgiving Blessings. My Neighbors Aren’t All So Fortunate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The most recent show (PRH’s 46th) featured the group Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, whose installations dealt with issues like police brutality and the importance of physical self-care. The visiting artists helped to organize a Houston chapter of their group while they were in residency.
 
The second lesson, then, is to consider and reflect the community that you’re in. Project Row Houses gives black artists a much needed platform in a historically black neighborhood. The art is physically very accessible to local residents, and the works at hand respond directly to the surroundings they were created in, providing a common point of reference no matter how esoteric the end product might be. The art now reaches beyond the homes, as well. This spring, Project Row Houses co-presented a performance and installation by Kevin Beasley in the Third Ward’s defunct Eldorado Ballroom, an iconic venue for jazz and blues from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Project Row Houses, an art space in Houston’s historically black Third Ward, where the “shotgun” style of home-building predominates. Courtesy of Flickr.

What tends to grab the attention of outsiders is the next step Project Row Houses took after securing the homes and infusing them with art: the establishment of the Young Mothers Residential Program. Eight of the renovated shotgun homes were subsequently designated as subsidized housing for single mothers between the ages of 18 and 26, and their children. To be eligible to live there, these low-income mothers must work and pursue higher education, and their children must be enrolled in daycare or school. The mothers are deeply integrated with the artists, and are encouraged to apply the creative process and artistic expression to their own lives. They also represent a crucial part of the audiences for the arts at Project Row Houses.
 
This program has been a springboard for PRH’s involvement in other issues in the Third Ward: There are tutoring nights for local schoolkids, an incubator and semi-annual community market for local small businesses, and a partnership with Rice University to design and build sustainable new housing options. That Rice partnership has created 72 rental units for low-income residents that are managed by sister organization Row House Community Development Corporation.
 
This leads to the third and trickiest lesson, but the one with the deepest potential: Social safety nets are part of an arts community, too. That doesn’t mean that any old arts organization should start a soup kitchen in its basement. Instead, each arts group must carefully observe and consider its community and its environment, and then make something that fits that context.
 
“You respond to what’s in front of you and you make something out of it,” Lowe said on Social Design Insights. Project Row Houses, he added, “positioned the community as art, the people as art, and everyone all the time working on their art, which is their life.” Nikil Saval, writing for T Magazine, called PRH “one of the most original and ambitious works of art of the past century.” In 2014, Lowe was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, which helps fund Project Row Houses.
 
Project Row Houses is part of a bigger story in Houston. Like so many neighborhoods where artists have made a concerted investment of time, creativity and resources, the Third Ward has seen substantial development over the past 15 or so years, including an upcoming $33 million renovation of nearby Emancipation Park, complete with a community center. Gentrification is now a real concern in the Third Ward, and PRH’s next move will be figuring out how to exist in an area where displacement, instead of disinvestment, is the driving community concern.

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But gaining outside recognition never has been the primary goal of Casa 0101, the 99-seat community theater, art gallery, and learning center that my husband Emmanuel Deleage and I founded and operate in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“Community” is a powerful concept for me, as it is for many residents of Boyle Heights, a heavily Latino area that once was home to large populations of Japanese Americans and Eastern European Jews, and today is struggling to cope with a wave of gentrification.

Josefina López, an actor, director, playwright, novelist, screenwriter of the feature film Real Women Have Curves, and artistic director of Casa 0101 in Boyle Heights. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and came to the United States with my migrant parents. Although my parents immigrated legally, five of my siblings and I were undocumented for a long time because we’d been born in Mexico. Part of our mission at Casa 0101 is to take the stories of families and of our community—including the pain and the shame—out of the darkness and into the light, by dramatizing it.

I’m an actor, director, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter (and a painter, and a cordon bleu chef—but those are other stories). But what I’ve realized over 20 years is that doing theater is about being a shaman, because we know that theater evolved out of religious ceremony and spiritual rituals. As a shaman or as a curandera (healer), I help the community to exorcise its ghosts, confront them, then collectively let them go. We’ve done that with shows like my odd couple comedy-drama Detained in the Desert, and an adaptation of Tattoos on the Heart by Father Gregory Boyle, the priest and founder-director of L.A.’s Homeboy Industries.

A lot of the community that I have built has been as a result of hearing people’s suffering. I had a couple of writing students who were gay, and they talked about how hard it was for them because they were supposed to be “perfect” immigrant sons and take care of their parents. But then at night they were engaged in really destructive, risky behaviors. And I said, “We need to create a program or something that tells people it’s okay to be gay; you don’t have to divide yourself, you can be whole and be gay.” So that’s how we started an LGBT workshop.

We had a show about rape two years ago, and the challenge was how do we talk about rape for 90 minutes and make it engaging. And we did it. Instead of blaming the victim we looked at other ways to present it. When you dislodge the shame and neutralize it, people leave the theater lighter.

We have an ongoing presentation called Chicanas, Cholas y Chisme, which arose several years ago from my perception that although we were trying to tell women’s stories and Latina stories, we didn’t have enough women directors and producers. We started to identify other women directors, but we knew only two. So I decided to teach a directing class for women directors, and to develop women’s stories in our playwriting group. Eventually we made an evening out of it, and the women brought out all their family and friends, and it was a big success. Some of the plays were clunky here and there, but for the writers and directors this was like a dream come true. The first time we did this we had eight or 10 shows; the last time we had 21, because we had so many women who’d done it before and loved it so much that they stayed on.

At Casa 0101, we set high artistic standards. When people think of community theater, they always think of really bad acting and bad sets. We say, No! To us, what’s at stake is to tell our stories to the community, and for the community to feel reflected back—and vice-versa. Helping people bond through art gives them pride in the community, so they want to stay in their community, and the community keeps growing.

The exterior of Casa 0101 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Casa 0101.

Our community of Boyle Heights has changed a lot. When I was growing up, the area was troubled by gang violence. Today, Boyle Heights is seen as this hot neighborhood that’s been revived by the Metro Gold Line, and it’s attracting real estate speculators and new businesses aimed at hipsters. Nobody liked the gangs and the violence and all that. But now we’re caught up in a kind of economic violence. And it’s funny, because when I started the theater, I wanted people on the Westside to see how nice it is. I just didn’t think that people would want to come and live here! I’ve thought, “Oh no, did I accidentally help gentrify the neighborhood by making it nice and cool?”

So I’ve started a performance art troupe called Comfort: Disturb, which is an artistic response to gentrification. If all we do is protest and we get angry, then the narrative gets changed and suddenly we’re the bad guys. Now there are artists coming in from outside the community, who say they’re trying to “bring art to the people.” But our response is, “No, can’t you see? There’s already theater, there are already galleries, there’s all this history, and you’re whiting it out and pretending like this canvas doesn’t exist.”

I think the only thing you can do now is to raise the conciencia. I did a play last year about gentrification, Hipsteria, and it was set about 20 years in the future. The last building from Boyle Heights is being condemned, and this lady has been fighting to stay and she gets kicked out, and these hipsters move in and they’re going to turn it into a dog hotel. And she refuses to leave; she decides to live on the street and just keeps paying the parking meter to occupy that space. She wants the hipsters to know that her home was neglected so that the landlord could invoke the Ellis Act, condemn it, and then sell it at a huge profit. And it was a true story: In Hollywood there was a lady who organized the mothers against gang violence, and got kicked out.

Then we did another play called Sideways Fences about a guy who fixes cars and his wife is pregnant and works in a 99-cent store, and they’re being pushed out of their converted garage.

So it’s really about raising consciousness. We can’t point the finger at the people who want to move here, or open businesses here. Really the bad guys are the developers and the city officials who allowed the neglect to happen over 20 years. So to point fingers now only adds to the shame, and that will not build community. We can’t do to others what was done to us, because it only perpetuates the shame and the oppression.

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Most inquiries ask what makes Cleveland special. Too often, the responses that are given to the media are civic booster-speak. Once the fifth-largest city in the nation, John D. Rockefeller did create Standard Oil while in Cleveland. But one must be be wary about firsts, subjective rankings of contributions, or people that have “changed the way we live.”

Calling the city “special” can be problematic. Cleveland fits the pattern of many other midwestern industrial cities, particularly those situated on the Great Lakes. As a historian, I long for more studies that contextualize not only our industry but also social life, class, and benevolence in Cleveland with other cities, particularly during the years just before and including the turn of the 20th century known as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The Gilded Age intrigues me because it is the era in which landscape, philanthropy, and migration coalesced to make Cleveland an important player in the nation’s economy and political life as well as in culture and education. Landscape, diversity and philanthropy gave Cleveland a significant history and primed the city for future growth—including some of the gains of today’s post-industrial era.

Cleveland’s location, on a lake (Erie) at the mouth of a river (the Cuyahoga), is not special. Classically, many cities were perched on waterways for transit and trade. That’s why Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the first survey party in 1796 and the city’s namesake, decided to establish the town at the site. He expected the community to develop as the mercantile center for a surrounding agricultural hinterland. But, it would become far more than an agricultural entrepot. The discovery of iron ore, coal, limestone, petroleum, and other natural resources in the regions around the lakes in Ohio and Pennsylvania some 50 years later, would transform a community of merchants into a community of industrialists, inventors, and workers. Efficient transport networks, canals, railroads, and lake shipping provided links to markets and resources and by the late antebellum era, created the foundation for a period of immense growth.

A 1917 poster from the Cleveland Board of Education’s Americanization Committee.

Today, landscape and place still play significant roles for the city and the surrounding region, but the impact extends beyond commerce. Like other industrial cities that had a “lock” on business and industry because of their water and rail networks, Cleveland’s jobs and factories begin to exit the area via the new postwar highway networks, and later through channels of global industrialization. But, the lake remains, as does a now relatively clean Cuyahoga River. Both now are seen as lifestyle amenities and while both still carry commerce, they have also anchored waterfront entertainment venues and other recreational attractions. The waterfronts are also an important part of the sales pitch for businesses seeking new workers in the competitive high-tech and medical labor markets. But the lake’s most significant quality is its looming future importance beyond lifestyle given the realities of climate change. There is no shortage of water in Northeast Ohio.

While acknowledging the importance of the lake and river, many citizens still lament the loss of industry and the extravagant lifestyle they link to the industrial barons who lived in the region, with a palpable nostalgia for old Euclid Avenue, once known as Millionaires Row. The area once hosted dozens of spectacular homes that were ostentatious showcases of Gilded Age wealth. Several remain, but the splendor is gone. Yet, the legacy of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era wealth of the city is embedded in many of Cleveland’s cultural, medical, educational, and social service institutions.

One can argue that the barons of the Gilded Age should have paid their workers more and spent less on dividends, charity, and culture. That’s an interesting question for me, given that my immigrant grandfathers worked in the steel mills, and that today, I work for two institutions, Case Western Reserve University and the Western Reserve Historical Society, whose growth was supported in large part with Gilded Age money. The futures of those institutions depend on a continuity of a local philanthropic tradition.

This legacy money—which also created Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and University Hospitals—is now being joined by funds provided by a more diverse set of donors. A drive or bus ride down Euclid Avenue today shows not mansions, but an always-evolving medical, educational and cultural complex. The names (such as Ahuja, Seidman, Mandel and Wolstein) on the newer buildings on the avenue and in University Circle indicate the manner in which the New England tradition of community stewardship has been augmented by communities that arrived in the years since the 1830s. Call it what you will: stewardship, tzedakah, or charity, these traditions of altruism have been central to the city’s history and have created institutions that seem to be anchoring its future.

The diversity of names on the buildings on Euclid Avenue and in University Circle is the result of a process that the founders never expected. They envisioned Cleveland as an outpost of New England. That’s why they laid out a town square at its center. But the growth of commerce and industry attracted a global population. The immigrant and migrant flow provided not only cheap, replaceable labor in the factories, but also skill sets and ideas critical to innovation. In 1920, two-thirds of the population of nearly 800,000 was of foreign birth or foreign parentage. Another 35,000 residents were African-Americans, the majority having come in the years since 1900. As was the case in Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, and other cities, they created a web of neighborhoods anchored around their workplaces and a network of culturally attuned stores and businesses.

Today, some of the “Ellis Island” neighborhoods endure, their identities marked not so much by the ancestry of their current residents, but by structures, stores, and restaurants. They are home to the city’s evolving “foodie” culture, to many young professionals, and to the beginnings of gentrification. That diversity also colors memory—in positive and negative ways—among Clevelanders with deep roots in the city. There is still, despite recent demographic changes, a local passion for remembering roots and ancestry. The question often asked of a newcomer in Cleveland is not “What do you do for a living?” but “What are you?” in terms of one’s ethnic identity.

All of this is happening in a city and region in which the percentage of foreign-born is now well below the national average, whereas between 1860 and 1950, the city was well above average. Yet, the number of national/ethnic identities is now larger than ever before. Some estimates put it at over 110. So, on one scale the city is not as “ethnic” as it was in terms of numbers, but on another, the region is more globally representative than ever.

Here too, some see the future in the past, arguing that immigrants can bring new skills and viewpoints to the city and to the workplace, and that a more globalized Cleveland would better reflect the broader world in which it exists. Some local groups focus on attracting skilled immigrants, while others see the city as a home for refugees who could acquire skills and settle in the city. Indeed, there are many open spaces in Cleveland, a city that once housed over 900,000 people and now has fewer than 400,000. Perhaps those spaces could provide refuge. However, the matter of diversity is encumbered by political rhetoric. There is also the question of who would be displaced in the job market if there were an influx of new job-seekers competing for the non-technical, less skilled jobs in the region.

Yet the city has “been there” before in this regard. In some instances—industrial strikes and urban unrest—the consequences have been brutal. Yet, what was to be a bit of old New England did transform itself and survive. Cleveland’s future will need to echo a past in which it transcended the location that gives it an identity and came to embrace ideas, skills, and concepts of altruism from around the globe. Does that make it different or special? Perhaps. But even if not, it is a city with a history that begs for further exploration.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Cleveland’s “Millionaire’s Row” Still Glitters With the Gilded Age’s Unanticipated Legacy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By 2010 this ethnic change in South L.A. had continued such that people of Mexican ethnicity outnumbered blacks everywhere east of Interstate 110, from Watts north to Interstate 10.

The two of us have long studied the ethnic quilt of Southern California, and recently updated our 1997 book on the subject. For us, the story of South L.A. is part of a larger, shifting story of segregation and desegregation. This second change—of blacks shifting and being replaced by Latinos— is not special to South L.A.; it has occurred in other once-segregated ghettos in Altadena-Pasadena, Monrovia, Pacoima, Long Beach, and San Bernardino.

Housing and home ownership are at the center of this story.

From roughly 1920 through the 1960s, white society generally did not permit blacks to own or rent housing outside certain areas. Restrictions on the future sale of a home to only whites were widely found on property deeds, and mortgage lenders usually restricted tightly the area within which they would provide a loan to a black family (a practice known as redlining).

Between discrimination in the job market and
low levels of educational attainment, even blacks who owned houses in these areas often did not have the money to maintain the housing very well. These difficulties in homeownership and maintenance resulted in increasingly poor and crowded housing in the ghettos. South Central (now South LA.), named because it focused along Central Avenue, was the largest such ghetto in the region.

When segregation began weakening during the 1960s, some middle-class blacks left behind the oldest and poorest housing east of I-110. They moved westward into other South L.A. neighborhoods or to Inglewood or southward into small cities like Compton, Gardena, and Carson.

While the public often associates the 1980s and 1990s in South L.A. with crime, the 1992 riots, and related challenges, there was another reality: housing prices were rising along with home ownership. In the 1990s, in fact, professor James Craine of Cal State Northridge has shown that housing prices in the South L.A. area increased faster than those in Los Angeles County as a whole. By the 2000 census, 40 percent of black households in South L.A. were owner-occupied, according to USC Professor Dowell Myers.

Behind those rapidly rising prices was strong demand on the part of Latinos, especially young Mexican and Mexican-American families. That demand, and the price trend, have mostly continued, with the exception of the Great Recession, which began in 2008.

One result: many black families in South L.A. have built substantial equity in their homes from earlier decades, giving them much more choice about where to live. And people have taken advantage of that choice, with former residents of South L.A. dispersing across other areas of Southern California.

Blacks in the San Fernando Valley, for example, have become widely distributed, though primarily in neighborhoods where housing costs are relatively low or average. In more distant places like Lancaster, Palmdale, Victorville, and Moreno Valley, some blacks were able to purchase inexpensive new homes, priced low because those locations meant long commutes to jobs.

Population numbers can disguise this dispersal. Between 1990 and 2010 the number of blacks in the five-county area increased by 1 percent. That small change hides the fact that blacks in Los Angeles County decreased by 6 percent during this period. But the number of blacks in Orange County grew by 43 percent during the same period, with even faster growth in other outlying counties.

Within the cities of L.A. County, a similar dispersal pattern emerges. Blacks now comprise just 9.6 percent of Los Angeles City’s population while blacks represent a quarter of the residents of Gardena and Carson. But the place with the highest percentage of blacks in the five counties of Southern California is a prosperous and unincorporated neighborhood bordering South L.A., View Park-Windsor Hills, where 85 percent of the population is black.

View Park is a reminder that the broader dispersal of blacks across the region is not the whole story. There is still a large area of South L.A. in which blacks comprise at least 45 percent of the total population. This includes View Park-Windsor Hills and the mostly middle-class black populations of Baldwin Hills and Inglewood.

Many blacks who could afford to move far from South L.A. prefer to stay more closely connected with community there, and some who have lived in neighborhoods with very few blacks have moved back to South L.A. for reasons of cultural comfort—to be closer to the institutions, services, and retailers that serve that large black population. Middle-class blacks have developed a strong social, cultural, and commercial focus in Leimert Park.

Despite the recent dispersal, Los Angeles remains quite segregated between blacks and whites. The level of residential segregation can be measured by what demographers call “the index of dissimilarity,” the most widely used statistic for this purpose. John Logan and colleagues at Brown University have calculated that L.A. is the 14th most highly segregated of the 50 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest black populations.

But such a ranking represents an improvement. Our calculations for 1960 show Los Angeles as the second most segregated metropolitan area in the country; in that year, only Chicago was more segregated.

We have found the segregation that still lingers is no higher between whites and blacks than between whites and Mexicans, or Chinese, or Salvadorans, to name a few of the many new immigrant groups creating their own communities among friends and family who have also made the journey to Los Angeles County.

Those communities may too disperse in time. L.A.’s desegregation since 1960 was most directly the result of blacks moving slowly but steadily out of their segregated ghettos into what had been mostly white suburban neighborhoods. Our mapping shows that the major sources of the diminished numbers of blacks in L.A. County are still those leaving old black concentrations that had been built up in the days of segregated housing.

So South L.A., as now constituted, represents a legacy of both segregation and desegregation. Or to put it another way: South L.A. and its people, through their movement, have reshaped not only their region but also communities throughout Southern California.

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The street portraits of King are made mostly by sign painters, almost never by trained artists. Street portraits of Dr. King don’t last forever. Murals get defaced, paint fades, businesses change hands, and neighborhood demographics shift.

King is typically depicted accompanied by great figures such as Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks (though in recent years I’ve been seeing less of Mandela and Malcolm X).

The slain civil rights leader doesn’t just appear in historically African-American neighborhoods, but appears—reinterpreted—in others as well. I found a version of King in a mural remembering Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American autoworker who was the victim of a racially-motivated murder, in the ruins of Detroit’s former Chinatown. In Los Angeles, King is often depicted in the same style as other brown-skinned Mexicans in street murals by the self-taught sign painters. A friend upon seeing a photo of a mural remarked that he looked like a “Tolteca” Martin Luther King.

Images of King mushroomed on the walls of South Central Los Angeles after the 1992 race riots. In South L.A. in 2016, King is accompanied by Pancho Villa, Benito Juárez, Cesar Chavez, and the Virgin of Guadalupe; most popular since 2009 are portraits of him alongside President Obama. Following population changes, King murals have moved west, across the 110 and toward South Western Avenue. I’ve seen street images of King disappear as his likeness is substituted by the suffering Christ or by President Obama.

As we celebrate a national holiday honoring King, we can enjoy the dialogue he inspires showing how ordinary Angelenos—and other Americans—incorporate him into their culture.

The post Martin Luther King Jr. as Folk Art appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The discussion before at a standing-room-only crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue produced a lot of knowing nods and sighs from audience members. An audible gasp arose when panelist Keith McNutt, the western region director for The Actors Fund, talked about 3,000 people waiting in a lottery for 55 affordable units.

KCRW News Producer Saul Gonzalez, the moderator of “Is Gentrification L.A.’s Next Defining Issue?”, started the lively conversation by asking urban planner Gilda Haas for a 30-second definition of gentrification.

Haas started with a disclaimer: “First of all, gentrification isn’t about hipsters and I’m sorry if there are some hipsters out here. It’s not about you.”

“It’s not being for or against change—it’s about being for or against involuntary displacement,” she said. “It’s about the bigger question: Who has the right to the city?”

UCLA cityLAB director Dana Cuff noted that there are two issues with gentrification: housing affordability and neighborhood character. People who own property in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying always think the change is fantastic, while those who are renting or looking for new housing think that it’s terrible.

“The only part of me that’s optimistic about our city and all of its changes is it’s inevitable and that we have continuing engagement of public processes,” Cuff said.

“If we don’t engage with the planning and political process, it will happen in spite of us,” she added.

Former City Planning Commissioner and UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs alumna Maria Cabildo echoed the point that there’s a need for long-time residents of gentrifying neighborhoods to join in the planning process.

Cabildo, who previously led the East L.A. Community Corporation, said the organization discovered that “gentrification is happening in a person-to-person transaction with single family homes. You can’t really intervene in that transaction. Can you really shame an African-American family who is selling their house in your neighborhood, making a huge profit and then they’re going to retire on that?”

Cabildo suggested asking instead: What kind land does the government control? And what kind of power does the government have over property in a jurisdiction?

For instance, she said, “If they allow industrial conversion, require that they have a high level of affordable housing.” She applauded a recent California Supreme Court decision that allows cities to make developers sell some housing at below-market rates.

Cities can also change zoning laws to encourage denser development in different neighborhoods. “There’s no increased density in Westwood—what a lost opportunity,” Cabildo said.

McNutt noted that the larger pressures brought on by a lack of affordable housing can cause unintended consequences. For example, The Actors Fund—some of whose members make $25,000 or less per year—has been trying to build affordable housing in East Hollywood and improve a neighborhood with a 36 percent poverty rate.

“But what happens when we try to deliver those services?” he said. “Antennas start perking up … In 20 years, none of those families will live there anymore.”

He noted that stronger rent control and rent stabilization laws could protect low-income people from being pushed out in a challenging housing marketplace.

“I don’t think the answer is to put up bars and keep people out as much as it is a workforce issue,” he said. If “hipsters” or well-paid app developers are moving into a neighborhood and driving up prices, he said, “How come we’re not training kids who grow up here? … How come we’re not teaching them to participate in those great jobs?”

Gonzalez noted the antipathy towards some of the wealthier people moving into these neighborhoods and asked, “What are the missteps they make?”

Cabildo had a quick answer: “Columbus-ing—It’s like they discover our neighborhoods,” she said. Cabildo says she overhears people saying of a place like Boyle Heights with its rich history, “I discovered this neighborhood. The people are so nice.”

After the audience laughter died down, she added, “Don’t do that.”

But Cabildo also noted later that while arrogant hipsters are the most visible characters in the gentrification saga, people of all income levels are being affected.

Cabildo said she recognizes that when she moved to Eagle Rock 12 years ago and converted a triplex into a single-family home, she displaced Occidental College students. “Middle-class Latinos are not going to Whittier Hills like they used to,” she said. “They think, ‘Maybe I’ll move to El Sereno.’”

During the question-and-answer session, a woman who was on the land use committee of her neighborhood council asked what laws could be changed to bring more fairness to the process of gentrification.

Haas suggested the Ellis Act, a state law that allows landlords to evict tenants under certain circumstances, should be repealed—or at least be more stringently enforced so that landlords actually follow through and take units off the market as promised. She added that she would also ask the city to stop giving out any more permits for luxury housing until the affordable housing needs were met.

“That will keep you busy,” she said.

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